


Somewhere Waiting For Me

by mightyscrub



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Family, Fluff, M/M, just entirely floof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-28
Updated: 2016-10-28
Packaged: 2018-08-27 12:03:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8400985
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mightyscrub/pseuds/mightyscrub
Summary: Unrepentant fluffy domestic au where John and Adam raise the kid Snakes together.  The family all goes to the aquarium.  That's it pretty much.  Happy almost-birthday, Lis!





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Skitty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skitty/gifts).



> For the ever delightful Lis aka creamhearts aka bigbosselot aka probably a yoshi whose birthday is actually on the 30th but I'm physically unable to sit on stories ever it seems xD

A six-year old boy with very thick glasses and a backpack was walking alone. 

The aquarium was crowded today, and it took him awhile to find one of the staff, a young woman in a jean-blue shirt with a nametag smiling at passersby and offering ecology pamphlets.

He shuffled in front of her but lost his voice, just kind of awkwardly standing there until she noticed him.

She smiled more. “Hey there! Are you here with your parents?”

He was a smart kid. The words ran very politely and precisely through his brain.

_My name is George. My family is here but I got separated from them and I’m lost. Can you help me find one of my dads?_

But his mouth was much more shy than his brain, and as a blush crept up the back of his neck he wound up blurting out, “Where are the octopuses?”

She smiled and pointed him down a corridor.

“Th-thank you.” He bowed his head and hurried in the direction of some nonjudgmental tentacled friends.

If he just kept in one place, surely someone would find him sooner or later. Might as well spend that time with his favorite animal. Nothing bad could happen while octopuses were around…

He gripped his backpack straps tight, and on the zipper a cuttlefish keychain jangled sweetly.

x

“George!” David excused himself around a very bosomy woman, zigzagging through a dark hallway lined with windows onto eerily blue-glowing exhibits. “Hey George!”

“Where are ya, stupid?” came Eli’s voice from down the hall. He sounded more bored than concerned.

David came up next to his twin, stuffing his hands in his pockets. The boys looked identical in the face, but David was a bit chubbier. They’d both been chubby children, but now at twelve Eli had hit his early teen growth spurt first and was therefore stretched out a bit. Eli’s hair was also blond and long, under a black cap emblazoning some illegible metal band. Meanwhile David had a brown buzzcut and often a frown on his face, like now.

“What are you doing? We’re supposed to be looking for him,” David grumbled.

Eli sneered. “I’m doing what anybody does at an aquarium. Lookin at fish.”

They were parked in front of a particularly large glass window that looked into a mostly empty expanse of blue, spacious enough for a few medium-sized sharks and those bizarrely large fish from the open sea. David watched a lopsided sunfish float slowly across the top of his vision.

“You didn’t even want to come to the aquarium,” David said, still grumbling.

“Maybe if they fed the sharks or something interesting, I’d like it.”

But even as he said that, Eli was somewhat transfixed by the tank in front of them. He was staring at a couple of small eels on the rocky floor of the exhibit, their little spike-toothed mouths opening and closing, their eyes unblinking. Most people would accept Eli’s apathy routine but David, who had known Eli since before birth pretty much, could see what was really going on.

“Nerd,” he scoffed.

Eli wrinkled his nose at him. “Fuck you,” he said. The boys had only recently begun utilizing The F Word, and so he wound up whispering it, unable to hide the flicker of his eyes to his periphery, as if expecting their father to merge out of the wall and box his ears.

David rolled his eyes. “Come _on_.”

“Whatever, I’m not wasting my day looking for that kid,” Eli said petulantly. “He’s fine. Dads probably found him already.”

“And if they haven’t?”

“Maybe the staff’ll feed him to the piranhas like all the little boys that get lost in the aquarium.”

“Whatever you say, Cousteau.” David began to leave and was sure to bump his twin’s shoulder roughly as he walked past. “While you’re making googly eyes at those sharks, I’m gonna find our brother.”

“Have fun, hero.”

David made a muttery growl of a noise and left Eli to his own devices.

It was a big aquarium. George was smart, he wouldn’t leave the building on his own. But it was still a lot of space to look for such a little kid.

David found himself walking faster through the crowds, looking every whichway. What if some creep tried to kidnap George or something? Or less than that: what if George was just scared and crying wherever he was? David hated it when George cried.

In his single-mindedness, he was looking in every direction except right in front of him. He walked straight into somebody—another kid his age, but a scrawny one. David knocked him clean over, and the kid dropped a bag, the Velcro of which unlatched and spilled books everywhere.

For a moment David jimmied his leg agitatedly in place, worked up and wanting to find his damn kid brother already. But the laws of politeness won out in the end.

He knelt to help pick up the books.

“Sorry,” David mumbled.

“Sorry,” the other kid said, almost in unison. He had a pair of glasses that he was readjusting on his face with his free hand as he scooped up books with the other.

“What are _you_ apologizing for?”

“I don’t know! Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing, geez.”

David squinted down at the books in his hands. He recognized them vaguely, a series he’d seen nerdier guys lug around at school. They were those Japanese comic books that read backwards. The topmost cover had some cartoon girl lounging across a robot and making a peace sign. She had huge boobs.

He glanced up at Four Eyes skeptically, and the guy at least had the decency to look embarrassed as he accepted the books and shoved them back in his bag.

“Uh. Thanks,” he said. He was taller than David, but also skinny as a greenbean, clearly somebody who’d done his growing upwards but not his growing outwards yet. His bangs were kinda greasy, and his t-shirt was probably a medium but still baggy. If you looked up nerd in the dictionary, there was probably a picture of this guy.

“Yeah… Sorry, I’m just looking for my kid brother,” David said, the explanation more there to fill up awkward conversational space and provide an escape route than for anything else.

As David continued down the hall, however, Four Eyes followed him. “Y-you’re brother? He’s lost?”

“Yeah.”

Somehow they continued talking, Four Eyes staying a pace behind him, lugging his messenger bag along.

“How old is he?”

“Six.”

“Oh man… I have a little sister, so…”

“Yeah, it sucks.”

“Lemme help you out.”

David stopped, abruptly enough that Four Eyes almost walked into him, and looked over his shoulder at him appraisingly.

“You don’t have anything better to do?” David asked.

Four Eyes’ mouth thinned, his eyes flitting downward. “I’m just here by myself,” he said. “I mean. It’s just one other person, but eyes are eyes, right?”

Well, if Eli wasn’t going to be any help, maybe a partner could come in handy.

“Fine,” said David. “Come on.”

They covered a lot of ground, with Four Eyes’ long legs and David’s strong ones. Four Eyes chattered nervously most of the time, talking about the plot of “a sci fi show” that David suspected was an anime. After a thorough scan of half the inside exhibits, they went outside to a deck overlooking the nearby bay, the somewhat briny smell of aquarium tanks instantly replaced with the fresher salt of the open sea.

They called George’s name almost in unison, approaching the railings hanging over the gently lapping waves and tidepools below.

A congregation of sea lions was showing off down there, drawing a small crowd at the railing. It took awhile for the two boys to weave their way through all these people, slowly scanning each midriff for the head of a child.

David made a frustrated noise, and Four Eyes tentatively put a hand on his arm, just a ghosting of fingertips.

“You ok, man?” he asked, glasses slipping down his nose.

“Yeah,” David muttered. “He’s probably fine. He’s just a nervous kid is all.”

Four Eyes nodded, quietly understanding.

They took a moment to regroup, as David fidgeted grumpily and frowned down at the basking sea lions.

Four Eyes’ nerves were almost palpable, clearly the sort of person made uncomfortable by even the smallest amount of ire in his vicinity.

“They’re like dogs, right?” he asked abruptly.

“Huh?” said David.

“The sea lions.” Four Eyes smiled a little manically and gestured. “They’re like water dogs. Big ol’ lugs.”

The guy’s desperate awkwardness was almost clownish and David snorted, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.

“Always wanted a dog,” David murmured, finally relenting into a reciprocal conversation.

Turned out Four Eyes was as good a listener as he was a chatterer. He leaned his elbows on the railing and watched David expectantly. “Yeah?” he pressed. “My parents won’t let me have pets either.”

“We have a pet, but it’s a cat and she only likes my dad.”

“Cats are like that, I guess.”

It was a stuttering, awkward conversation with a few half-embarrassed laughs, but the boys began to acclimate to each other. The nerd wasn’t so bad, really.

“What’s your name?” David asked finally.

“Me?” Four Eyes asked ridiculously, as if there could’ve been anyone else. “It’s Hal.”

“I’m Dave.”

“Ha. That’s a good one.”

“What?”

“Hal and Dave.”

Was that 2001: A Space Odyssey? David looked out over the ocean, the dark grayish expanse under an overcast sky, and felt his nerves settle down to their proper places. George would be fine. They would find him.

“That is pretty good, huh?” He grinned and Hal smiled back.

x

John Sears was making a very formidable face, exuding such an aura of thinly veiled intensity that a few passersby kept an extra step away from him as they walked by, watching him warily.

His husband Adam, however, was not at all fazed, and even held John’s hand, as if they were on a light-hearted date.

“Don’t worry so much,” Adam said, smiling but with an ever-present keenness in his eyes, keeping tabs on the people passing around them.

John shrugged a shoulder irritably.

They had entered one of the main atria of the aquarium, a semi-open space that walked out onto a viewing deck over the actual bay. They were entirely unaware that this deck was exactly where David and Hal were currently watching the sea lions.

Instead, the two fathers stayed inside, circling where a baby beluga whale was fenced into an open exhibit, the water shimmering just under their feet.

“John,” said Adam, lightly touching John’s arm with his other hand. “Let me tell you what I would do to anybody who’d hurt our boy.”

John’s eyepatch side was to Adam as he faced ahead, but Adam knew he was listening anyway.

“If somebody hurt George, the first thing I would do is tear off their arms,” said Adam. “Then I’d beat their face in with their own arms. Funny, right? Then I’d puree them. Like in a blender. The one at home with that really smooth function.”

His smile was so light and serene that still anybody walking past was more unnerved by his husband’s glower than the quiet murmur of this questionable conversation.

“Then I’d put a little umbrella on the glass, a maraschino cherry, and I’d feed it all to that whale right there,” said Adam, nodding to the exhibit below them. “Seems like a nice whale. So he’ll get a snack and George can get a good laugh.”

Strangely, this spiel of gleeful violence seemed to calm John down.

“He’s shy…” John mumbled, rubbing his thumb into Adam’s hand. But his shoulders had relaxed somewhat.

“Like you,” Adam added with a brief and somewhat wicked grin. “But he’ll be alright. There’s a lot of security in here and he’s smart. He’s a good boy.”

“He’s a good boy,” John repeated in affirmation, staring down at the white bulk of the whale under them.

Adam pressed a stealthy kiss to the side of John’s beard, and a quiet rumble of recognition vibrated in John’s chest. John’s cheeks went a little pink and he glanced away, starting to move again and resume their search.

But his hand stayed tightly latched to his husband’s, bringing him along.

x

George was fidgeting, but it was hard to get too nervous looking into a fish tank. The tiny gentle movements of the water were soothing, and a very large octopus friend was smooshed in the corner against the glass.

George stood as close to this corner as possible, because this was as close as he could get to touching this octopus friend. He imagined reaching out with his mind and holding the big tentacley blob through the glass. This was also comforting.

He would have talked to it maybe, but he was extra shy in this scenario. He hated embarrassing himself, but especially in front of someone as esteemed as an octopus.

“Hey, stupid.”

George jumped, for a moment thinking this was the octopus speaking to him so disdainfully, but on some level he recognized the voice and sure enough when he turned around, blinking rapidly behind his thick glasses, there was Eli right next to him.

“Eli!” George said it way too loudly and got some weird looks.

“Yeah. I found you so I guess I win the game.” Eli’s sneer was scornful, but then he placed a hand on his little brother’s shoulder and it was surprisingly gentle. “This guy look out for you?” He nodded toward the tank.

George smiled, a pinchy sort of smile that wanted to be bigger but was too shy. “Yeah. This is a good octopus.”

“Thanks for babysitting, Doc Ock. I had a feeling little George would be wherever the tentacles were.”

“I wanted to stay in one place,” George recited. “Like if you get lost in the woods.”

“Hey, that’s pretty smart!” said Eli, with a fake but good-natured show of surprise. “Guess you’re not as dumb as you look.”

George continued to smile, unfazed by his brother’s usual teasing. He was too relieved.

Meanwhile Eli was carefully inspecting the tank, his expression uncharacteristically calm.

“The ocean’s kinda beautiful, huh?” he said. “Guess that’s why you like it so much.”

“Yeah,” said George happily.

Eli’s hand rose from his shoulder to ruffle his hair.

“I know that backpack! George!” The boys turned to see Adam waving from across the room, dragging John through the crowd with laudable precision. George gripped his backpack straps and puffed out his chest, looking a little like he was about to cry.

“Be more careful next time, please,” Adam told him, but that was the only chastisement he could get in before John had crouched down and bodily scooped George up into a bear hug. Adam and Eli took on similar looks of quiet exasperation.

“I’m sorry,” George said, muffled under his dad’s chin, but John huffed the apology away and brought George up onto his shoulders. George looked very at home sitting up there, smiling wobblingly and gripping his hands in his dad’s hair. This always stung John, but John would never say so.

“Together again,” Adam said on a big sigh. His small smile turned rather stonier however as he looked at his family more closely. “Where’s David?” he asked.

The little family glanced around each other’s faces awkwardly. John slowly began to frown again. Their searching wasn’t over, it seemed.

“Goddammit,” Eli said without thinking, and Adam boxed his ears for swearing.

x

David and Hal’s search had brought them back inside and to a particularly dark room, the only light the phosphorescent glow of various tanks of tiny filmy jellyfish. It was mesmerizing, like being surrounded by idly floating stars.

“It’s like Jupiter should be in here,” said Hal, with a nervous laugh.

David smiled quickly, then took out his cellphone, the little screen illuminating their chins. He pressed a few buttons with his thumb.

“Phone number…?” he mumbled.

Hal’s eyebrows rose over the reflective circles of his glasses. He took his phone out as well.

“Uh.” Awkwardness stopped them for a moment.

“I mean, I can let you know when I find George… if we get separated…” David said, quickly and quietly.

“Yeah! Yeah, yeah.”

“And you can, uh. Well. We can check out the other exhibits or something. You’re alone right? So I’ll come with you. Sometime.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I’ll owe you one.”

“That… That’d be great!”

Hal’s quick grin shone white in the colored patches of light in the room, and the two boys laughed breathy and nervous.

Neither of them really understood why they wanted to see each other again. They were, after all, only twelve.

But the knowledge that they _would_ sat warm and comfortable in their stomachs.

It turned out they both could use a friend.


End file.
